The invention relates to a method for providing information about a parking spot. The invention also includes a navigation apparatus that is used to make this information available to a driver of a motor vehicle, and a motor vehicle that has a corresponding navigation apparatus.
A method for providing information about a parking spot is already known from DE 10 2009 027 543 A1. The method described in this document involves computation of the shading of a parking spot by an adjacent building from a prescribed position of the sun. This involves the use of a trigonometric formula or a ray tracing method. The shadow profile over the course of the day is then obtained from the juxtaposition of shadowing at various times of day.
A disadvantage of this method is that a very large amount of information needs to be known about the silhouettes of the buildings around a parking spot in order to be able to compute a reliable estimate of the shadowing. In addition, conditions that vary with the season, such as the shadow that is thrown by trees with their foliage, can be taken into account only with difficulty.